“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Indeed, if after such an enjoyable exercise you look about you and compare what you have envisioned with what you have, then you may feel worse than you did before. [...]

The same applies on what you may think of as a more practical level, in that each day also holds within it the answers to current problems. [...]

[...] Your greater being also possesses its own originality, yet there will be what you may think of as a family resemblance, and so overall you and your other self often choose the same kinds of challenges, if in dissimilar ways.

[...] Their progress lies latent within the window of the moment point — the moment point simply being your current intersection with the reality that you know.

You cannot say that your ancestors, like some strange plants, were growing toward what you are, or that you are the sum of their experiences. [...] A leaf feels its deeper reality as a part of the plant, and adds to its own sense of continuity, and even to its own sense of individuality. [...]

Much of “Unknown” Reality is involved with the breaking up of theories that have been long accepted, but that prevent you from perceiving the powerful nature of those absent portions of the self. As you focus upon certain details from a larger field of physical reality, so then you focus upon only the small portion of yourself that you consider “real.”

[...] The ancestral and reincarnational lines merge to some extent to form what you think of as your genetic patterns ahead of time, so to speak. Before this life you chose what you wished from those two main areas.

[...] Let me briefly continue that early Seth material here: “In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said (in the 16th session) that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was, therefore, a natural law of the universe. Not only do these so-called laws, which are not laws, vary according to where you are in the universe, they also vary according to what you are in the universe. [...]

[...] The dream world may have no material reality in your plane, and yet its existence in many respects is no less than what you consider reality. [...]

As I have said, there are gentle, imperceptible gradations between what is called self and what is called notself. Your idea, or psychologists’ idea of environment for example, will come close to what I mean. [...]

[...] Not only this, but in all cases its own excretions are needed for nourishment of what is notself, or by what seems to be notself.

[...] The influence of any given self reaches also into realities that are not bounded by space and time.

[...] I am not saying that his reality is not his own, that he does not have the joy and responsibility for it, but that you also share a joint reality.

[...] You can specifically say that this has to do with what you call your psychic work, but even before “it” began he was aware of that energy of his, concerned about using it, focusing it, delighted with it, and afraid of it at the same time.

[...] The fact that psychic books, so-called, do not give him what he thinks of as conventional literary praise is annoying but not basically pertinent.

[...] These brakes have been applied in what you think of as the psychic arena because that is the chosen situation. [...]

[...] As you know, all aspects of physical reality first exist within the framework of nonobjective reality.

[...] The solutions which he makes within his dream reality are often, however, not the same solutions that he accepts within physical reality.

I have told you that dream reality is more cohesive than you may have supposed. Such characteristics as shared dreams go a long way to stabilize dream reality. [...]

[...] As identity is strengthened through experience then it automatically expands itself to add further realities which it is now able to manipulate.

[...] All That Is possessed (pause) a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings, dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what?

(Pause at 9:57.) When that answer came, it involved previously unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All That Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible progeny to see what conditions were needed for this even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity. What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner realm? [...]

2. Seth first discussed the “sleepwalkers” in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality—see Session 708 for September 30, 1974. Here’s a much-condensed version of what he told us that night after break ended at 9:56:

In “Unknown” Reality, then, Seth’s material on the sleepwalkers heralded one of the main themes of Dreams, which he began five years later. Dreams was unsuspected by us then, of course; so what books to come will have their genesis in this one?

[...] What you call nature refers of course to your particular experience with reality, but quite different kinds of manifestations are also “natural” outside of that context. The laws of nature that I am in the process of explaining underlie all realities, then, and form a firm basis for multitudinous kinds of “natures.” [...]

[...] Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless. [...]

(In my Introductory Notes for Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I explained how Jane acknowledges the mail we get from our readers by sending them copies of letters from Seth and herself; to the latter she adds a few personal lines for each correspondent. [...]

(In those notes I also referred to an earlier letter that Seth had dictated for readers in January 1973, and it can be found in Chapter 8 of Personal Reality. [...]

(9:26.) Again, what actually happens is that the energy of your being impinges, say, at seven [moment] points² into the three-dimensional system. At each of these points, what seems to be an isolated life is experienced. [...] You follow a one-line pattern of history, pursuing certain actions as reality and identifying with these so completely that they are all you perceive. [...]

In many instances you travel outside of three-dimensional reality while dreaming, but your experiences must then be recalled in physical terms or you would have no memory of them. [...] There are as yet undiscovered, bizarre changes in the brain during certain dream states, an acceleration that quite literally propels the consciousness out of its usual space-time continuum into those other realities from which it comes.

[...] “I don’t really remember what I said,” she told me, “yet I do feel that in this material we’ve gone beyond what we’ve gotten before. [...]

[...] (Slowly:) You must remember that beginnings and endings are realities only within your own system of three-dimensional life.

[...] The invisible reality within the cell is what gives it its structure. [...]

They certainly have a reality in energy, and they aid in the conversion of energy into physical terms. [...] They have been the impetus for what you think of as evolution. [...]

(Neither Jane nor I could remember what last Thursday’s session was about, and I had but one page of it typed from my notes — a situation quite similar to that prevailing before the last session. [...]

[...] Jane laughingly told me that if the new data “wasn’t good enough,” she’d probably never again hear from the people involved — but at this time we didn’t realize what was to follow.

[...] Yet when I am finished, I hope you will discover that the known reality is even more precious, more “real,” because you will find it illuminated both within and without by the rich fabric of an “unknown” reality now seen emerging from the most intimate portions of daily life. [...] (Pause at 11:35.) Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. Your psychologies do not explain your own reality to you. [...] Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you [just] as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.

(Pause at 11:51 — then with much emphasis.) The fact is that in life you poise delicately and yet perfectly between realities, and after death you do the same. I used the opportunity, then, to explain the great freedom available to Robert Butts’s mother after death — but also to explain those elements of her reality present during life that had been closed to him consciously because of mankind’s concepts about the nature of the psyche. I comment now and then about photographs that belong to the Butts family [including Jane Roberts], yet any reader can look at old photographs and ask the same questions, applying what is said here to private experience. The “unknown” reality — you are its known equivalent (again, louder). Then know yourself. [...]

These institutions and disciplines are composed of individuals, each restrained by limiting ideas about their own private reality; and so it is with private reality that we will begin and always return, period. These ideas in this book are meant to expand the private reality of each reader. [...]

(11:11.) The unknown reality, however, is unknown enough to usual reaches of the most flexible consciousness, in your terms, that it can only be approached by a personality as couched in it as I am. [...] One of my purposes then has been to make this unknown reality consciously known.

Now, specifically this applies to the work of what Ruburt and you would refer to as spiritualistic. The work of mediums, or books about mediums, that deal exclusively with conventional religious concepts, and that interpret reality in those limited terms.

[...] At some future time I will indeed discuss this more thoroughly, and on some occasions in the future you may become more aware of other portions of my reality. [...] My reality includes the Seth reality.

[...] Jane’s trance was now deeper, her delivery more emphatic and a little stronger.) We will want to deal overall with the nature of reality as it exists within your camouflage system, as it exists in other systems, and with the overall characteristics that pertain to it, regardless of any given manifestation. That is, certain characteristics belong to reality, regardless of the methods by which it brings itself forth.

[...] The systems vary, the systems being the manifestation of reality as it shows itself in various forms. [...] Certain characteristics however belong to reality regardless of the very methods and the various manifestations.

[...] (Long pause.) Your position on the scale of awareness inclines you to categorize consciousnesses so that only your own familiar brand seems to fit the definition—so again here I remind you that consciousness is everywhere in the deepest terms, because All That Is disperses itself throughout physical reality. All portions of that reality have their own rights to existence, and purposes within it. [...]

10:01 P.M. Near the close of Monday evening’s session, Seth had given us an insight into the nature of his own reality. [...] His statement is particularly intriguing because Seth indicated that in his nonphysical reality, “wherever that is,” he’s still developing, just as we are “here on earth.” [...]

[...] It turns into what I have called [an] EE unit, in which case it is embarked upon its own kind of physical experience.” And: “Units of consciousness (CU’s), transforming themselves into EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial one.”

[...] Then I’ll need another week to go over the manuscript, with colored pens marking instructions of each page as to what copy we want set in roman [upright] type, and in italics; while doing that I’ll also check spelling, punctuation, references, dates, times—all of those mundane details so necessary in helping our publisher produce a finished, good-looking book for the marketplace.¹

For an exercise, then, imagine for a while that the subjective world of your thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rockbed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. [...] Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of your own subjective reality. Forget what you have learned about reactions and stimuli. [...]

As mentioned before (in Session 828), early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities. As a species, however, you have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which you also now have your existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. [...]

1. Jane and I have also been thinking of Mass Events as an extension of Seth’s second book, Personal Reality. It seems incredible to us, so fast has the time passed, but counting Mass Events Seth produced Personal Reality five books ago — and some five to six years ago from this moment; he dictated it during 1972–73.

(Since Jane began dictating Mass Events 11 months ago, I’ve mentioned our checking the printer’s page proofs for two of her other books: Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, and Cézanne. [...]

[...] When training forces the ego to become too rigid, and to limit its perception of other realities, then the intuitions will not be accepted by the ego because intuitional experience will not fit into the framework of reality as the ego sees it.

We will be involved with a study of the characteristics of the dream world in general, and attempt to isolate it as a separate reality simply for the purposes of examination. Then we shall consider it rather carefully in its relation to physical reality, using comparisons and dissimilarities.

The ego skims the topmost surface of reality and experience.

[...] It must of necessity be focused within the confines of physical reality.

(To me [Rob]:) Now I hope you will understand me intuitively, for what I have said [tonight] confounds the intellect to some considerable degree. [...] This in no way minimizes my reality, or Ruburt’s.

[...] Jane believed Seth when he told us he was an “energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical reality” — she just wanted to know more about what he meant by that statement. [...]

[...] Consciously, then, we had no way of appreciating what important and interesting parts those “senses leading to an inner reality” were to play in the material over the years. [...]

In certain terms, and in certain terms only, and speaking now as the psychological bridge personality, then what you perceive in me and these abilities represents a portion of Ruburt that is utterly free in those directions — a portion of the human mind, as you understand it, goes beyond the threshold of itself into other dimensions of actuality; then, as best it can, it translates what it learns, sees, and experiences. [...] And so you can see what happens!

[...] They have great freedom within what you think of as the framework of your reality. [...]

(With much animation:) As an example, it appears to you that animals do not reflect upon their own reality. Certainly it seems that a cell has no “objective” knowledge of its own being, colon: as if it is without knowing what it is, or without appreciation of its own isness. [...]

[...] “God, I get impatient!” she exclaimed “But in physical reality I can get only one of them at a time, and you can write just one sentence at a time.⁷ Oh, forget it, Seth,” she added, half laughing, for that “energy personality essence” was ready with comments on what she’d just told me. [...]

But for such consciousnesses the bulk of their activities will be elsewhere, possibly in other probable realities, possibly in nonphysical realities that we can hardly imagine from our own vantage points. Those who die unborn, or young, choose to touch upon physical reality to fulfill certain needs; they glimpse it as one might a view through the window of a passing automobile. I really believe that those “certain needs” can have vast implications, by the way, but this isn’t the place to attempt a discussion of such aspects of reality.

3. Now what, I wondered, as I typed this session from my notes, does Seth mean here, and in the paragraph above? Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint just what he’s saying. [...] Instead, I thought, by “another form” he may mean an explosion of ideas or knowledge in our reality, with the tremendous objective results that would follow. [...]

1. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, I wrote in Note 7 for Session 681 that atoms are “processes” rather than things. [...] What a heretical thought from the scientific viewpoint!) But each atom of whatever element is an amazingly complicated, finely balanced assemblage of forces and particles woven together in exquisite detail—one of the more basic examples of the unending and stupendous creativity, order, and design of nature, or consciousness, or All That Is.

[...] Did a meson, for example, choose to participate in an atom-smashing experiment in order to merely peek in on our gross physical reality for much less than the billionth of a second it exists with that identity, before it decays into electrons and photons? From its viewpoint, our reality might be as incomprehensible to it as its reality is to us—yet the two inevitably go together.

[...] They are the unstated portion of physical reality, the unmanifest medium in which your world exists. [...] The smaller particles that make them up become “smaller and smaller,” finally disappearing from the examination of any kind of physical instrument, and these help bridge the gap between unmanifest and manifest reality.¹

As you have an ego, fully conscious, directed toward the physical world, you also have what I call an inner ego, directed toward inner reality. [...] It deals with an objectified reality. [...]

[...] It is, however, only the manifestation of what in those terms can only be called the greater life out of which your life springs. This is not to compare the reality that you know in derogative terms to the other-source existence, either, for your own world contains, as each other world does, a uniqueness and an originality that in those terms exists nowhere else — for no world of existence is like any other.

I am speaking of that framework now only as it applies to your world — not in its relationship to other realities. [...] He saw quite correctly that there was a great give-and-take between the two frameworks — your regular working one, Framework 1, and this other more comprehensive reality. [...]

[...] It represents the vaster psychological reality in which your own subjective life resides.

He did not mean to stay within physical reality. He only came to show you what was possible, and to bring the both of you to an understanding of inner reality. [...] He was done with it, and he only returned so that both of you could learn the truths and inner realities that you are now seeking.

The child knew well what he was doing, and subconsciously you also knew. [...] He will not return, but go to another reality where his abilities can be used to more advantage.

I use the word acquaintanceship, for in this life, on a physical level and in physical terms only, you did not understand him for what he was, though you sensed what he was and to some extent reacted to what he was.

[...] I am interested in what you should know, and what you should know has little to do with names and dates.

[...] But the true reality cannot be put into words. [...] The words are merely symbols for the reality. You need the words in your state of being but only each of you in your own way can search for the reality that has no need of words. The reality that needs no sound. [...] You translate what they say into words, but the inner knowledge within you exists long before any alphabet was ever known. [...] Beneath the clothing is the person and the reality. [...]

[...] There was also another person connected with the affair who telepathically knew what was going on, and in his own way helped bring about the events and communicated them to you. [...]

(To Martin) Now what I said to you earlier did not refer to the meeting. [...]

[...] It will be different to each of you, for it is your own personal path into probable realities. [...]